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Source code :
https://github.com/yjs/y-crdt
Documentation :
https://docs.rs/yrs
Grant
Theme fund: NGI Assure
Start: 2021-04

Yrs

Collaborative editing with CRDT written in Rust

Yrs "wires" will be a native port (in the Rust programming language) of the Yjs shared editing framework. Abstractly speaking, Yjs allows many users to concurrently manipulate state that eventually converges. It is a popular solution for enabling collaborative editing (Google Docs style) on the web because it is indefinitely scalable, works peer-to-peer, and has a rich ecosystem of plugins. There are plugins that allow you to connect with other peers over different network providers (WebRTC, Websocket, Dat/Hyper, IPFS, XMPP, ..) and there are many editor plugins that allow you to make existing (rich-)text editors collaborative.

The Yjs project is about connecting projects with each other and providing a network-agnostic solution for syncing state. A native port will allow native applications (e.g. XI, Vi, Emacs, Android, iPhone, ..) to sync state with web-based applications. We chose Rust because it's well suited to be embedded in other languages like C/C++, PHP, Python, Swift, and Java. With Yrs, we want to connect even more projects with each other and provide a modern collaboration engine for native applications.

The Rust implementation will implement the full feature set of the shared types, including the event system. This will enable users to parse existing Yjs documents, manipulate them, and implement collaborative applications. The port will make it easy to "bind" to another language so that the shared state is available in other languages as well. There will likely be a WASM binding, a C++ binding, and a Python binding (provided by Quantstack). Other existing features like awareness, selective Undo/Redo manager, relative positions, and differential updates will be added after the initial release.

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This project was funded through the NGI Assure Fund, a fund established by NLnet with financial support from the European Commission's Next Generation Internet programme, under the aegis of DG Communications Networks, Content and Technology under grant agreement No 957073.